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Environmental activists Greenpeace have announced the winner of their competition, the Heathrow Contest, which asked architects to design a fortress that would allow protesters to physically block the construction of Heathrows third runway if construction went ahead.

Entitled Groundswell, the winning design was created by architecture graduates and designers Lukas Barry and Alastair Parvin, both based in London. Their proposal features a network of rooms and tunnels hidden beneath a mound of earth.

A panel of judges, including Turner Prize-winning sculptor Rachael Whiteread and architect Peter Clegg of Fielden Clegg Bradley Studios, admired the winning entry for its simplicity, beauty and because it encouraged a collaborative approach to its construction.

Greenpeace describe the winning entry as a defendable structure, which is a physical articulation of people-power. It will be collectively created by the thousands of individuals who oppose the runway plans, each person contributing a sack of earth to build up the structure. The tunnel network within the structure will be kept a carefully guarded secret.

Barry and Parvin described their design, saying: What really grabbed us about this project was that it was an opportunity to explore a fundamentally different way of making things. Where traditional architecture has always been built by the few to impress upon the many, this would be the opposite: a structure built by the many to impress upon the few. If groundswell goes ahead, we think it will be the world’s first truly ‘crowd-funded’ structure.

The competition, launched in January, invited architects, architecture students and the general public to submit designs for a structure that would physically block the planned construction of the third runway at Londons Heathrow Airport.

The announcement of the winning design comes after plans for the third runway were scraped by the UKs new coalition government.

There will be an exhibition of a selection of the best designs at the Bargehouse Gallery in London, from 2-6 June 2010.